Natural products produced by microorganisms are a promising source of new drugs. Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) and its Saarbrücken-based site, the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS), have now discovered a new family of such compounds, elucidated their unusual biosynthesis, and developed a way to produce them synthetically. They also found that this class of compounds binds specifically to a human protein involved in the development of cancer. The findings were published in two thematically linked studies in Angewandte Chemie International Edition.

From October 2026 to July 2027, Prof. Irah King, from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, will conduct research at the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg, a site of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in cooperation with Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU). His stay is supported by the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. The award is endowed with 60,000 euros.

New active ingredients for drugs to treat infections, cancer, or other serious diseases are often based on substances originally discovered in microorganisms, plants, or other living organisms. Producing or improving such active ingredients in a targeted manner using microorganisms is often challenging because the underlying biological processes are extremely complex. Researchers at the Helmholtz Institute for Pharmaceutical Research Saarland (HIPS) have now shown that artificial intelligence can help with this task. Using AI, they developed novel protein building blocks for biological production systems. The researchers published their findings in the journal Nature Communications.